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Buzzwords or must-have recruitment strategies? In today’s competitive hiring marketplace, it is certainly the latter. If you want to attract the best talent, your approach needs to include actively building your brand and marketing yourself to candidates. Let’s explore.

What’s in a brand, really? A brand is the overall experience a customer has with your product, service and yes, your company. This brand is meant to distinguish you from your rivals. In other words, as an employer, it’s your reputation. With information online so accessible, it’s not surprising that your ideal candidates will check you out just as much as you vet them. When was the last time you checked your company reviews online? What are current and former employees saying about working at your company? Time to find out and manage your employer brand!

When you consider your employer brand, ask yourself questions such as:

· Which positions do we need to fill (now and in the future)?

· What qualities does our ideal candidate have?

· What makes us an exceptional employer?

· Why would our ideal candidate want to work for our company?

When focusing on your employer brand, the goal is to make your company a desirable place to work for those high-quality candidates you wish to attract. If you haven’t already defined your company’s values, vision and mission, outlining them will be key to managing your employer brand. Overwhelmed by the prospect of managing this process? We’ve got you covered, as we make Employer Branding Easy!

Employer branding is the groundwork, it comes first. After you’ve created a solid foundation with it, you can move on to recruitment marketing. You’re likely familiar that recruitment refers to the process of attracting, shortlisting, selecting and appointing suitable candidates for a job. Marketing, on the other hand, can be defined as promoting and selling products or services. Join them together and you get recruitment marketing. This process of recruitment marketing refers to the strategies you use as an organization to find, attract, engage and nurture talent before they apply for a job.

In other words, you use recruitment marketing strategies to showcase your employer brand. A key differentiator between the two is that your employer brand will remain constant, but you can opt to use a number of different recruitment marketing strategies over time (i.e. newspapers vs. the internet vs. social media). The main goal of every recruitment marketing strategy is to deliver the right message, in front of the right candidates, at the right time. We recognize that this unique “right” position can be a challenge to businesses, so we’ve created non-traditional staffing solutions with our Recruitment Packages, one benefit of such a package is it allows you to avoid paying a percentage of salary to recruiters once a position is filled. Instead, we create a Recruitment Marketing Campaign around your unique Employer Brand- a value you will use over and over again as you grow.

When determining which recruitment marketing strategies work for you, ask such questions as:

• Have we defined our candidate persona (a.k.a. target audience)?
• Do we have an updated career section on our website?
• Are we leveraging the power of social media, in particular LinkedIn?
• Have we built a funnel of qualified candidates to choose from?

Looking at the difference between the two terms now, employer brand and recruitment marketing, it’s clear that the key to hiring the-best-of-the-best is to use them together to leverage the impact on your company’s hiring process. Having a proactive approach that drives awareness about your company, building relationships and promoting your company in the marketplace of candidates is the best long-term approach to hiring right.

At AHA! We offer leadership and professional development programs, employee engagement solutions, and recruitment solutions alongside educational resources and other tools. To learn more about how we can help your team grow or to find out which Recruitment Program will work best for your business’ needs drop by the contact page and get in touch.